Sunday, June 26. 2005

During his meeting with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Saturday, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas told Rice that the PA had ceased all incitement activities against Israel. Yet on the same day that they met, the PA's official news service WAFA "reported" that Israelis were sending hordes of wild pigs to Palestinian villages around Hawarah village in the Nablus district to attack them and destroy their fields.

I have often wondered how people translate information into knowledge. During the Shoah, there was no historical precedent for the systematic, bureaucratically administered, mass murder of the Jews of Europe. Even when information became available, it took time to assimilate the dimensions of what was happening. Marie Syrkin, a Labor Zionist leader and editor of the Jewish Frontier explained how American Jews, including Jewish journalists who since 1933 had been actively involved in the fight against Nazi persecution, were not psychologically prepared to accept the truth:

Friday, June 17. 2005

"Who would have thought that Israel would become
the staunch supporter of the Arab staged plan for
the destruction of Israel,... ?

I once read that, on his death bed, Bismark (or some other famous
national leader) urged his son "never to underestimate the
stupidity of his leaders." (Perhaps some knowledgeable person
will help me find or confirm the source of that saying.) In any
case, the wisdom it imparts is worth considering especially as we
read articles like the one by Yossi Klein Halevni in The
Jerusalem Post a week ago -- "Religious zionism's day after:
After disengagement, it should pomote Israel's decisive role in
advancing the Jewish people" - 6.3-9.05).

Tuesday, June 14. 2005

When Menachem Begin, newly-elected prime minister of Israel, met president Jimmy Carter at the White House in 1977, he was almost immediately pressed by Carter to stop the settlement of Jews in Judea and Samaria. Begin replied that just as the president could not prevent American citizens from living where they pleased in the US, so he as prime minister of Israel had no right to prevent Jews from living where they pleased in the Land of Israel.

At a daily briefing on January 9, 1992, State Department spokesperson Margaret Tutwiler was asked about accepting the word "Palestinian" when referring to the territories of the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem. Her answer was that the U.S. had accepted this usage since 1979, but that it was for "descriptive" purposes only. Typical Foggy Folk gobbledygook and such.

SECURITY ALERT BOTTOM LINE - DEPORTATION WILL LEAD TO CHAOS
IsraelNationalNews.com - June 14, 2005

PA Senior Figure: "No Need to Disarm Terrorists"

The Palestinian Authority will not disarm militants until Israel totally withdraws to the pre-1967 borders, Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Nasser al-Kidwa said on Monday. PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has not distanced himself from the remarks, which mark a senior PA official going on record as being even more extreme than arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat.

Friday, June 10. 2005

I'M MAD AS HELLDON'T ASK ME TO BE A NICE JEWISH BOY
By Bernard J. Shapiro

I was mad as hell at the Oslo sell out of Israel - and I am still mad as hell. I will tell you why. After 2000 years of statelessness, we Jews finally achieved a rebirth of our independence in our ancient homeland, Israel. After 57 years of struggle, sacrifice, blood and tears, Israel had defensible borders and the most powerful army in the Middle East. So what does Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon do? He follows in the footsteps of Former PM Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, getting advice from Yossi Beilin.

Wednesday, June 8. 2005

Will he return? My guess is that he will. I used to think he wouldn't. Not under any circumstances. That he would disappear in the Arava desert and be a school principal. That he would go back to the barn on his kibbutz and organize a volunteer project. But now things look different. Bogey's anger is subdued, but deep. His anxiety about Israel's corruption is almost existential.

Friday, June 3. 2005

The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege
By Kenneth Levin
Smith and Kraus Global
599pp., $35
Book review by P. DAVID HORNIK
The Jerusalem Post - May. 29, 2005

Kenneth Levin, an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a Princeton-trained historian, has written a definitive, magisterial book about what went wrong during the Oslo era. The malaise, Levin argues, was not just an Israeli one, but a Jewish one, typical of both Diaspora and Zionist history in the modern era.